Back At It + New Camera

Well, I'm done with school, back home, and ready to get back to blogging. I have a lot of posts I need to catch up on, hopefully I will get to them all within the next month or two. I still have all my pictures from last summer to go through, including my pictures from the Lindsey Stirling concert I attended, and my cousins' and my trip to Colorado.

Some news, after filming the videos that I eventually turned into class, I decided that I needed a new camera that could get some shots my big bulky DSLR couldn't get. I like my big camera, but even though it has a video feature, you can't do very much with it aside from straightforward filming. You can't zoom, or even move the camera without it going out of focus, and it is pretty heavy, as I found out, trying to do an overhead shot by hold it it stretched out over someone for 4 minutes. I want to make a lot of videos this summer, just to practice, so I really needed something more. I had heard and seen great things about a tiny camera called a GoPro, so I decided to get one. I sold my old computer and used the money to buy this little beauty.

It is a great little camera. Extremely portable, and you can move it anywhere, and it's always in focus. You can even use it to get still shots, making it perfect for taking pictures in public without drawing a lot of attention to yourself. The only downside is that it only takes things using a super-wide fish-eye lens, but that is easily corrected in Photoshop, should you so choose. I actually like the effect for certain things, so I usually leave it.

One of the cool things about the GoPro, is that they make a ton of accessories for it. I've gotten a whole bunch of things for various uses. I have two housings for the camera, one of them waterproof, as well as a dash cam mount, letting you film yourself while driving, or get footage of the road.

I also have two poles for different kinds of overhead shots, or just to give you something to hold onto, to stretch the camera into places you can't reach.

For walking footage, I have a backpack clip, for more covert filming, and a head-mount, for a first person perspective.

So, with the new camera, I filmed the last video for my class, and after school, am continuing to film videos. I have lots of ideas, and will keep busy all summer. In the next few weeks I will start uploading my videos to YouTube, and I will blog them as they go up. In the meantime, pictures and more are coming! Stay tuned!

First Week Down

Well, my first week of school is done. It was pretty busy, but more happened than just school.

First I’ll start off with the school news. I have class every weekday but Friday. Monday and Wednesday we have Digital Drawing, which is going to be all about Adobe Illustrator. I am very glad for this. Learning Illustrator was one of the classes that I took at ITT Tech that I was very disappointed in. It was combined with Photoshop, and I never felt like I learned much at all there. As I’ve told a lot of people, you could tell the teacher was there basically just to earn a paycheck. The teacher for this class is completely different. You can tell she’s a graphic design genius, and all her students love her. Most of them have had her before, and it seems as though they are all one big family. They are always cracking “Inside” jokes about things that have happened in previous semesters. It’s kind of amusing to listen to sometimes. But my point is, this teacher seems a LOT more friendly and helpful than my teacher at ITT Tech was. I hope that this will be a very profitable learning experience this semester.

Tuesday and Thursday is Design 2. I’ve already told you that this is the same teacher I had in my very first semester over a year ago. He’s one of the best teachers I’ve ever had, so I’m glad to have him again. This semester there are only 4 students in the class, Joel and I are two of them, and there are also two other girls. The teacher told us that since the class is so small he wants to have our assignment be more personalized to our own styles, so he’s going to try to come up with assignments that are similar, but different for each of us to do.

Wednesday we also have Painting 2. The same teacher as Painting 1 last semester. Like I have said before, he is pretty new to teaching, but he is still pretty good. I like him a lot more than most of the teachers I had at ITT Tech, and they were all a lot more experienced than he is. I look forward to doing more paintings. (And yes, I still need to show my paintings from last fall, they will be coming soon… I hope…) And like Design 2, there are only 4 students, Joel and me, plus two other girls. The one girl is a girl from our Painting I class last semester, and I am assuming that the other girl is too. The second girl missed the first day, but she had already contacted the teacher, so I think she’s not going to be one of those students who flakes out and misses most of the classes and ends up failing. It would be pretty sad if that happened in an advanced class like this with so few students.

My last class is an online class, and it is called simply Graphic Design. I will not be able to access the class till Monday, but from the e-mail the teacher sent out it sounds like it may be more Illustrator. I am hoping that it will go beyond Illustrator though, as I would like to get into the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite as well.

Okay, now onto “The Other stuff.”

The biggest thing actually started a few weeks ago, but I hadn’t posted about it yet. I have been upgraded to “Checker” at work. (No, this did not come with a raise, that would be nice though! :) ) I still do courtesy work sometimes, but lately I have been working the cash registers more than I have been sacking. Last night I was on the express lane for about half the time, which was new. I’d never done that before. I think I prefer the regular checkout lanes. It’s a lot easier to check out the groceries when you are handing the items off to a courtesy to sack, and you don’t have to worry about running out of counter space when some one reads “Twelve Items or Less” and thinks it says “Twenty Items or more.” Plus the express checkers have to worry about cigarettes a LOT more than the regular checkers. If it was just a matter of which brand they wanted, this wouldn’t be a problem, but there are about 57 varieties of cigarette per brand and it gets very confusing.

A few days ago my computer decided that it wanted to spaz out and it began shutting down my anti-virus programs, spitting out pop-ups all the time, crashing every single internet browser, so it was completely impossible to get online, and just generally having a complete melt down. I think I either got hacked, or it caught a virus, either way it was a mess. I ended up saving my important files to a hard drive and completely erasing the memory, essentially starting my computer over from scratch. On the plus side, it runs a whole lot faster now, but on the down side all my files, programs, settings, favorites, and everything I had customized is gone. I’m still trying to get everything back to normal.

I got a new camera this week as well. This is not a fancy DSLR camera, but I wanted a small camera that I could carry around with me at times when a DSLR would be very inconvenient. I got a small Canon PowerShot with 12.1 Megapixels and a 14x optical zoom.

It also has a GPS function, which “Geo-tags” your pictures, and can plot out a map where they were taken. Normally I wouldn’t really care about this feature, but (And this brings me to the next bit of news) there is a very good chance that I will be going on a road trip this summer with some friends, and I will take full advantage of this camera setting if I go. :) I’ll explain more about the trip when the time gets closer to say for sure. Right now I’m almost positive I’m going though. :)

So, that’s all my news for now. I have more stuff to blog about, but it will have to wait for another time. If I have time tomorrow, I will share what happened last week at the zoo. It was very out of the ordinary! :)